Grace Zhao Week 1: Thank You, Five
I thank numbers. Mostly five, sometimes ten, and very occasionally fifteen, which is a strange habit considering numbers haven’t done anything for me. But in a rehearsal room, when someone shouts out, “Five minutes,” it’s always immediately followed by a chorus of voices responding, “Thank you, five.”
Outside of theatre, it would definitely warrant an explanation. Inside of it, it doesn’t. There’s an understood rhythm to it. Someone gives a time, everyone acknowledges it, and we all go back to our separate tasks.
That’s what I find interesting about theatre language. A lot of it is made up of ordinary words that take on a specific meaning. “Strike” means to take apart a set, “blocking” is the movement done in each scene, and “house” refers to the seating area for the audience. None of these definitions are particularly complicated, but knowing them means something because they come from being in the room.
Language does this constantly. Words only have meaning when people agree that they do, and communities take that idea even further. They develop their own phrases, shortcuts, references, and ways of communicating. Eventually, they become so familiar they start feeling less like vocabulary and more like an instinct. I don’t consciously decide to say “Thank you, five.” Somewhere along the way, a phrase I had to learn became something I simply knew.
Maybe that’s part of what it means to belong to a community. Not necessarily knowing everything about it, but recognizing things that would seem insignificant otherwise.
Theatre has taught me a lot of words. More importantly, it’s made me realize that language carries evidence of where a person has been. Sometimes identity isn’t announced, but it’s hidden in the small things we say without thinking.
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